Sometimes, like Samuel, we are asleep when He speaks to us. He wants us to wake up and listen – to be spiritually transformed from a position of complacency to a position of awareness. We’ve been dozing off not paying attention to what He wants to say and suddenly we sense Him in a new way. Our eyes are opened. Our ears are no longer deaf, and we listen.

Sometimes, God’s wakeup call is in a literal sense. We are sleeping. He calls us to wake up, often to pray for someone else, and we may not understand at the time why.

At other times, we are sleeping, and He uses dreams to speak to us. Do not underestimate the means and ways in which He can speak. You can know that He is speaking to you when what He says aligns with Scripture. He will never speak anything contrary to His Word.

Sometimes we are like New Testament Saul (see Acts 9), sleepwalking instead of sleeping. We believe we are doing the very things that God wants us to do. And then in the midst of our sleepwalking, we find we’ve been tangled into sin, and He is waking us up, calling us to do a new thing, the godly thing. Only God can do this. It is a supernatural experience when He wakes us up. Sometimes, while we are sleepwalking in obedience, we do not see the work that God is doing. He also wakes us up to see what He has done as we obeyed.

I have often struggled with transparency. Perhaps not the best way, but one of the ways I’ve been obedient to be transparent is by sharing struggles on Facebook. Facebook introduced a feature (which has since passed away) where I could see statuses I posted on this day one or two years ago.

On August 19, 2010, I posted: “I will never be enough. I should never be anyone’s ALL and someone should never be mine, but God the Father is more than enough and is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is my ALL indeed. Praise you, Lord.” I don’t remember the exact situation of why I posted that; I just remember that I had come to a place where I was tired of striving. Once again I was learning that God alone is more than enough.

On August 19, 2011, I saw my status and it spoke to me again, so I reposted it. Later that day, I got a message telling me that my post had helped bring new life to someone who had wanted to die and had attempted suicide. It was a whole year after the fact that I even knew that this person had attempted to take his or her life. God used my obedience to be transparent in my struggles in a way I could have never known or imagined.

I was called to write the Awaken study with my friend Nikol. We spent most of 2011 getting to know one another and writing. We laughed, we cried, but we did it. Let me tell you how God spoke to me to accomplish this. We had a women’s retreat in 2011 based on the Sacred Echo by Margaret Feinberg. Basically sometimes God is speaking to us in everyday repeated words and echos.

I began seeing the word coffee everywhere. It was on Facebook. It was mentioned in people’s day-to-day comments. Everywhere I saw coffee. Now, I do not drink coffee, and this word coffee kept repeating, and it was repeating in an unusual way. Then I attended our church women’s retreat, where we discussed how God speaks to us through repetitive things. I saw Nikol at the retreat, but still, we did not meet. Coffee kept repeating. One day I was surfing the web and randomly found her website, Coffee with Christ. Immediately, I knew I was to contact her. And in doing so, I found that God had called her to speak and to write. God confirmed to her that we were to do something together. And that’s how it began.